“I resumed my work this morning; I am obeying the last words that Madame de Berny wrote me; ’I can die; I am sure that you have upon your brow the crown I wished there.  The Lys is a sublime work, without spot or flaw.  Only, the death of Madame de Mortsauf does not need those horrible regrets; they injure the beautiful letter she writes.’  Therefore, to-day I have piously effaced a hundred lines, which, according to many persons, disfigure that creation.  I have not regretted a single word, and each time that my pen was drawn through one of them, never was the heart of man more deeply stirred.  I thought I saw that grand and sublime woman, that angel of friendship, before me, smiling as she smiled to me when I used a strength so rare,—­the strength to cut off one’s own limb and feel neither pain nor regret in correcting, in conquering one’s self.”

Balzac was sincere in his friendship with Madame de Berny, and never ceased to revere her memory.  The following appreciations of her worth are a few of the numerous beautiful tributes he has paid her: 

“I have lost the being whom I love most in the world. . . .  She whom I have lost was more than a mother, more than a friend, more than any human creature can be to another; it can only be expressed by the word divine.  She sustained me through storms of trouble by word and deed and entire devotedness.  If I am alive this day, it is to her that it is due.  She was everything to me; and although during the last two years, time and illness kept us apart, we saw each other through the distance.  She inspired me; she was for me a spiritual sun.  Madame de Mortsauf in Le Lys dans la Vallee, only faintly shadows forth some of the slighter qualities of this woman; there is but a very pale reflection of her, for I have a horror of unveiling my own private emotions to the public, and nothing personal to myself will ever be known.”

“Madame de Berny is dead.  I can say no more on that point.  My sorrow is not of a day; it will react upon my whole life.  For a year I had not seen her, nor did I see her in her last moments. . . . She, who was always so lovingly severe to me, acknowledged that the Lys was one of the finest books in the French language; she decked herself at last with the crown which, fifteen years earlier, I had promised her, and, always coquettish, she imperiously forbade me to visit her, because she would not have me near her unless she were beautiful and well.  The letter deceived me. . . .  When I was wrecked the first time, in 1828, I was only twenty-nine years old and I had an angel at my side. . . .  There is a blank which has saddened me.  The adored is here no longer.  Every day I have occasion to deplore the eternal absence.  Would you believe that for six months I have not been able to go to Nemours to bring away the things that ought to be in my sole possession?  Every week I say to myself, ’It shall be this week! . . .’  I was very unhappy in my youth, but Madame de Berny balanced all by an absolute devotion, which was understood to its full extent only when the grave had seized its prey.  Yes, I was spoiled by that angel."[*]

[*] Madame de Berny died July 27, 1836.